Sleepless in Norwich

Watching our two children grow up, I always admired the ease with which they fell asleep. I think they have that from their mother, as I am someone who wrestles every night with every interaction I had the previous day, rehashing them in an effort to resolve them. 

But I'm NOT consistent. Some nights, I just drop right off, and if I dream, I remember none of it. Other nights, I toss and turn, trying to find that just-right position that calms the racing motor in my brain. 

I stumbled across this over the weekend and am keen to see if it works. You should check it out as well and get back to me.
-bill kenny

As They Say in Los Alamos

Some days you eat the bear.

And some days the bear eats you.
-bill kenny

A Little Dusty but.....

When you've written as much in this space as I have, for as long as I have,every once in a while, you rediscover a nugget from the past that still makes sense to you. In light of present political circumstances, this one surprised even me. 
At the time, I called it: 

How Do You Figure the Tip on the Bill of Rights?

When the Founding Fathers, assisted by others, created the Bill of Rights (and this is a marvelous site), they could not have foreseen the world in which we now live. 

For them, freedom of speech, and within that, 'the press', was a matter of newspapers and broadsides (one-sheet exhortations and excoriations on behalf of and in opposition to issues of Colonial America). 

That a growing number of people would choose to get their news from TikTok rather than what an aging boomer like me calls 'trad media,' is more than disquieting. 

We choose 'rock, paper, scissors' on where to turn and tune in for news and information. Truisms are often truths, and perceptions of reality are frequently reality. What we call news, no matter the presentation format, now does more persuasion and less informing today than ever before because advocacy draws better ratings than reporting. 

I can no longer define 'journalist,' hell, most of the time I can't even recognize one while wandering around things like YouTube. But I am chagrined to discover I can't swing a cat and NOT hit self-styled one on whatever platform I choose. Anyone with a keyboard and an Internet connection is a journalist (present typist included), it seems. And then we wonder why there's so much 'fake news.'.  

Most pander to audience 'segments' as long as those segments buy the products those platforms and messages are supported by, from the advertisers who bought them because the demographics deliver certain groups in large numbers.....and round goes the gossip. A self-licking ice cream cone.

You must get as tired reading it as I get tired typing it: the issues we face can't be captured in a seventy-second story with a ten-second stand-up location lock-out. They require our fullest attention, no matter our political beliefs (as a matter of fact, precisely because of our political beliefs). 

Not just Democrats or liberals require health care, and not just Republicans or conservatives are taxed too much. And people who feel that way or who feel differently don't come from another dimension or drink their bath water (or any of the other insults we manufacture when we disagree with each other). The farther out in space you travel, the more we all look alike down here. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
-bill kenny

More in the Mirror

If our lives are like candles, I'm pretty close to being little more than a wick. Great thing about hindsight, it's always 20./20 whether you choose to see what it is revealing or not. 

I was born before we elected Eisenhower as President. These days, he wouldn't get the time of day from the party he led at the time. Sic tramsit gloria, I guess. Struggled to put on a new T-shirt this morning with a tag that told me it was "Made in Vietnam," and going back more than half a century, I'm surprised I survived the world I grew up in.

I came of age with the War in Vietnam, not that I was anywhere near at risk. Fifty-eight thousand (plus) US military casualties and hundreds of thousands of damaged and destroyed lives later, we in the Land of the Round Doorknobs had our precious Peace with Honor. And those of us who were Baby Boomers, both the old enough to serve in the killing fields and those young enough to only watch it on TV, returned to our lives, already in progress.

We, the privileged who remained safe as houses on these shores, blamed our parents' generation and more ominously, those who bore arms in that conflict, for "the war" (the definite article, even then, made me wince). I was shocked--ashamed more than shocked--to eavesdrop on a conversation among service men and women the age of our two adult children recently on Facebook in which they, who have done an inordinate amount of the fighting and dying for almost the last decade in places the rest of us cannot find, turned their gaze on MY generation.

Not very pretty, but I fear, pretty accurate. My cohorts and I were described as the 'most self-centered people to ever walk the planet' with an indictment citing 'their exaggerated sense of self-importance and entitlement is beyond offensive and is why the world they are leaving for us is such a ...(large numbers of Bozo No-No words in combinations I'm not used to reading). I couldn't argue a single point any of the five or six posters made, and after I'd offer, 'but our intentions were good!' I'd have had nothing to say.

We gave the world sex without love or commitment-elevating it to a recreational (if not circus-like) activity that can and often does, when performed unprotected, kill people of every race, creed, and color. We traded blue skies and air you can breathe for BMWs, sub-standard schools, and sub-prime mortgages, then closed our eyes (and held our noses) as we started our descent into the abyss of political and moral bankruptcy. 

We reinvented the financial universe so that no one and everyone has money, and is also bankrupt, all at the same time. Not only did we make sure the toothpaste cannot ever be put back in the tubes, but we also flushed most of what we inherited from our parents down those very same tubes.

The children of the Boomers have already started to clean up after their elders, as gargantuan an undertaking as that will prove to be. A chapter of a book on a faraway shelf has come to a close, but the story goes on, because, as a nation, so, too, must we. 
-bill kenny

Another Life Lesson

If you have children in school, the end of summer is old news. You long ago knew it was gone as you readied them for this first full week. 

Even if your children are grown and gone, you're still aware of school as the buses wend their way throughout town, while elsewhere groups of youngsters of all ages trip and troop across sidewalks and crosswalks, all in the name of learning.

In the days ahead, many of us will be back to managing families the way a horse runs: one footfall at a time, rarely, if ever, looking far enough ahead to see if our path is taking us to where we want to go or, instead, leading us over the proverbial cliff.

Perhaps different where you live, but here in Norwich, now and when city budget discussions heat up next April, are really the only times we devote any thought to education, which is unfair to children, teachers, parents, actually, to all of us. This is not an advocacy for more money for schools-there isn't any more money, but, and it's a cliche, if you think education is expensive, try calculating the cost of ignorance.

You and I went to different high schools together-and, trust me on this one-different elementary schools, too. Our schools were so different from the ones our children attend, they could just as easily be from another planet. 

Actually, without putting too fine a point on it, it was a very different world, and when you look at us now, the society and culture we inherited from our parents and then look at what we are giving to their grandchildren, the 'stuff in the middle' is our doing.

A glance at a newspaper, a TV screen, a handheld device, or a computer monitor is all you need to confirm our world is a dangerous and different place now. Gone or going is the industrial age, being replaced often rudely and without ceremony by the knowledge age. 

I typed this on a workstation keyboard. Our children live in a world of hand-held digital devices that make our desktops and laptops look like Gutenberg's press. Access to information, the how-to, and the what-you-do-with-it-next are the world our children and theirs will live in, and lamentations about how that's not what school was like when we were young help no one at all.

Stasis in life and in learning is foolish and fatal. Everyone with an interest in education, and that means all of us, must recognize that the purpose of education should be to learn the rules of life better than anyone else so that you can change the rules. Always a good thing to remember, especially as the seasons change yet again.
-bill kenny

Leaf Me Alone

Another summer has come and gone. For those who've lived through the winter of our discontent, I'm hoping we have an Indian Summer and then a lovely fall that mysteriously and miraculously blends effortlessly into a beautiful New England spring. 

What's that you say? Winter. Sorry, I can't hear you, and there's no point in speaking up or repeating yourself; I still can't hear you. I understand the restorative powers and the role each of the seasons plays. I don't choose to enjoy winter. Ever since I didn't get that new sled for St. Nikolaustag a couple of decades ago, I'm over it.

Considering the speed with which this summer passed and the number of us who had fervent hopes but few plans for what we were to do with it, perhaps what I should learn is to enjoy the days while they are here.

Anticipation is great (and perfect on burgers), but savoring the flavor of the moment, while in the moment, may be something us old people who think we're not should cultivate and not try so hard to avoid.
-bill kenny

My September Song

Here we are ending the Labor Day Weekend. What's that feeling? The neuralgia of nostalgia? You decide. 

Leave it to the unofficial closing of another summer to make me nostalgic, bordering on maudlin. Technically, I'm enjoying my 73rd Labor Day, though in truth, I have no memory of the earliest ones, and I've yet to get a clear sense, despite a reasonable amount of reading, on how old we are before we have memories.

Is that true for you as well? I'll suddenly flash on something from my childhood and not be altogether sure if it's real, or a remembered clip from a movie--my Mom's youngest brother, Paul, when we visited her parents in Elechester out in Flushing, Long Island, (before the World's Fair and Shea Stadium), always calling me 'droopy drawers' and pulling down my trousers and laughing. I recall being a small child, helpless to prevent it and enraged at my own impotence (though I didn't realise that's what I felt at the time). 

Growing up, I always heard relatives say I looked like Paul, which made me tighten my jaw and hold on to my pants. I think they said that because we both had freckles and lots of them. I know my coloring made me burn up in the sun, as after twenty minutes without sunscreen, I looked like a lobster. And when the burn finally faded, I wasn't tanning, but peeling. 

At times later in our lives, my sister Kara reminded me of Paul, especially when she laughed, which is a little odd because by the time she was born, Paul and his family were living out on the west coast and rarely came east. 

I flash forward to that same uncle in the back seat of my car, with my father's step-brother (an actual priest) in the shotgun seat, as we rode to the cemetery in East Millstone, NJ, to bury my father. I think that may have been the last time Paul came east, as some years later he was diagnosed with I-no-longer-remember-what from which he died. 

I was in Germany, in the era before cheap long-distance phone calls and the Internet, so letters and cards were the bridge from home, and I learned we only read you when you write, and no one likes to write bad news when it's still news, so I learned of his death months, if not longer, after it had happened. 

When I was a kid, we hadn't yet gone back to school; that happened after Labor Day, and when the New Year began, I'd always look ahead on the calendar to see when the first Monday in September was, always hoping for a date that looked like the 5th or 6th, as if wishing would make it so. Thank goodness we now structure school calendars by union agreements and not on any educational goals, requirements, or needs.

I've never attended my high school or college reunion--one of the places I worked for some years used to hold worldwide reunions every two years, in different locations around the globe, and I never worked up the interest or the passion, or, in all honesty, the courage, to attend any of them. 

I have a growing-more-dim-by-the-day memory of being one of 400,000 at Watkins Glen in upstate New York for the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and The Band, but all three of these bands are long gone, members dead. The souvenir tee shirt "Ball 'n' Boogie" went from the dresser to the rag bin to the garbage decades ago. 

My generational cohort grew up in the swamps of Vietnam and in the aftermath of the murders of JFK, MLK, and RFK. We survived Timothy Leary better than he himself did, had parents who didn't understand us (until we became them as it turned out), and stayed up late to watch a man walk on the moon. 

We were what sociologists call the Pig in the Python generation, and yet, I suspect when the last of us has passed (and we will, which, when we were kids, was inconceivable), we'll have left a hole akin to the one in a bucket of water when you pull your fist out. 

It'll be our children's children who'll wrestle with the consequences of our decisions on the environment, on energy, on public financing, and world-wide diplomatic outreaches and these days, as hard as we think they are right now, will, with the gift of hindsight, be viewed as the Golden Ones as they "hang round 'neath the vapor light." 
-bill kenny